So this comic is about fentanyl, and changing drug market in America, and specifically, the West side. Frisco. California. Where the entrepreneurial spirit knows no bounds.

This mini-comic is attempting to be a non-fear-mongering warning about what fentanyl is: why it’s now a factor in S.F, and causing over-doses. How the drug market here has many drugs that have had the supply of them contaminated with fentanyl, and had people take it unknowingly and O.D., and in some other cases intentionally. It is now mixed into most of the heroin here, and last year people were pressing fake pills containing fentanyl, promethazine, and traces of many other choice ingredients, in some cases creating a lethal cocktail. Some people mixed it into one batch of crack, and there were nine people admitted to the hospital and one fatality off that. Fentanyl is being imported from China and Mexico, with a host of other fentanyl analogues, some actually stronger than fentanyl. It is probably being produced domestically as well.

Everyone is talking about the Opiod crisis. The things that will help are nationally distributing and teaching people how to use Narcan in every county, increasing funding to social services and addiction counseling that were being funded by medicare and medi-caid, opening S.I.F.s(Safe Injection Facilities) in areas with heavy amounts of drug use, especially of street drugs, and lastly, even though people think I’m insane, legalization, or even decriminalization and regulation. In any case, people should have the facts, and at least understand the issues. If people increase restrictions on prescription of opiates, it will strengthen the domestic black markets for heroin and fentanyl. Only by acknowledging that there is a problem without an easy solution that won’t go away any time soon, can we start to realistically consider new solutions instead of incarcerating generations and never changing a thing.

Drug use has always been a reality in America, and conservatives have had free reign to try their solutions for the better part of last century and this one so far. Did they create a drug-free society? No. It’s time to try some new ideas and new approaches to an old problem.